Interview with Meredith O’Brien

— When did you know writing was for you?

I’ve been writing since I was a young girl. When I wasn’t crafting little stories, I was pretending to be a reporter. I would read newspaper stories out loud with my neighbor and we’d record ourselves on cassette tapes.

In high school, I was on the school newspaper staff, took creative writing and entered short stories in school contests.

Writing has always been a passion.

— How would you describe your books?

My first book, A Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum, is a collection of humor/parenting columns. (It’s available in paperback and Kindle.) The columns are warts-and-all comedic (sometimes sentimental) riffs on the insanity that occurred in my house when my three children — including a set of twins — were very young and I was attempting to work from home.

I was also a co-author of The Center for Public Integrity’s 1996 book The Buying of the President, which contains profiles of the 1996 presidential candidates and their major campaign donors. It was the product of a year of investigative reporting.

— Why was Mortified a book you wanted to write? Why did you decide to start blogging?

I first started reading personal blogs in earnest in 2004. I became fascinated with the format and wrote a feature story about the people, specifically women, who wrote them. In March 2005, I joined their ranks and started writing a parenting blog, The Boston Mommy Blog, for the Boston Herald’s web site. (I worked as a reporter for the Herald before my twins were born.) I loved the ability to instantly share my work with other harried parents and to hear their stories as well. Since then, I’ve blogged about parenting for a number of sites, contributed to several TV review blogs and blogged about pop culture, media and politics.

However as my children got older, they didn’t like the fact that I was writing about them on parenting blogs. Not at all. In fact, they asked me to stop using their names and eventually asked me to refrain from blogging about most things that happened in our house. I completely understand their request and largely stopped writing about them, even though some of the material would’ve made for some great columns.

Although I have scaled back on blogging about my children as they’ve grown, other bloggers haven’t made the same choices. Some folks keep writing — sometimes quite vividly — about their kids’ experiences with adolescence and puberty. Additionally, some bloggers do not seem as if they keep certain parts of their private lives off-limits. They write their unvarnished opinions about intimate aspects of their lives, as well as the lives of those they love, in a way I never could. Their reveals certainly make for compelling reading, but I often find myself wondering whether there is every any fallout from their oversharing. By writing Mortified, I got the chance to imagine what it would be like to share everything online. It’s not for me.

— What are your thoughts on blogs and how people can do like the character in your book – overshare?

I honestly don’t think that the majority of people overshare do so with ill-intent. People are oftentimes just looking to vent and aren’t necessarily assessing the long-term implications of the material they’re sharing online.

In the case of the main character in this book, Maggie Kelly, she’s very unhappy with her life and doesn’t have a good outlet for her intense dissatisfaction. She creates a blog, which she thinks is anonymous, and treats it like an online diary when, in all honesty, she shouldn’t. No one should. Maggie thinks that the angry and ugly feelings that are churning inside of her which she shares online will never be connected to her because she doesn’t list her last name or her hometown. She turns out to be very, very wrong about that. In real life, we’ve seen countless stories of people who’ve created “anonymous” blogs who wound up getting fired or otherwise humiliated when their blogging identity was revealed.

If there’s one message that I hope people get from this book, it’s that the internet is not a private place.

— What are some of the worst moments of oversharing you have seen online?

I’ve seen parents write about very private moments with their children — whom they name — about things like periods and body development. I’ve read online accounts where in-laws and/or exes are maligned.

— What is the hardest part of the writing process for you?

I have a difficult time determining when my material is ready for someone else to read it. I could edit forever and probably still tinker with word choices here and there. At some point, you just have to let go.

— What are your favorite genres to read?

I’m all over the map on this, very eclectic. I go from reading novels by Jennifer Weiner, Jodi Picoult, Ann Hood and Tom Perrotta, to humor by David Sedaris and Dave Barry, along with various works of nonfiction. Over the past year, I’ve also been re-reading some of the classics.

— What do you want readers to take away from your story?

The meta-story is that we all have a tale or two about being mortified by someone close to us. We’ve all been there. It’s not a good place to be. However in the modern era of blogs, Facebook and Twitter, it’s frightfully easy to mortify people we love online, for the whole world to see. It’s one thing to make an embarrassing remark about a spouse at a party, it’s another to make it online where it’s Google-able.

— How important do you think social media is for authors these days?

Authors should know how to use it to promote their work, to engage with other folks (readers and writers alike) and to give kudos to fellow writers. Social media knowledge these days is as necessary as having access to the internet.

— What would be your advice to aspiring writers?

Try, as best as you can, to develop a very thick skin. (I’m still working on that.) Then, fearlessly, go for it.